This invention relates to a new type of watch construction, and more particularly to a watch design in which the case thereof includes within its usual dimensions a sound chamber and an electronic speaker for generating musical sounds.
Prior art wristwatches broadly describe use of "sound" in a wristwatch. However, the acoustical quality of such sound-producing devices is severely limited by the type of sound-generating devices and the size of the enclosure. For example, many of the so-called "speaker" watches to date are just achieving synthesized (simulated) speech. Typical among these are U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,440,526 and 5,197,044 which describe an integrated circuit with clock functions and the like, which not only actuates an animation feature, whereby the mouth of the character moves, but also synthesizes speech and drives the speaker. In this design, a very large and quite cumbersome case with the embodiment of the character mounted thereon is utilized, as compactness and generating quality music was never the goal, and certainly was not achieved in the prior art arrangements.
The prior art also includes analog watch designs also using piezoelectric buzzers to generate sound through a vibrating or perforated case back, thus marring the attractive and fashionable cases such analog watches strive to attain, as well as producing sounds not suitable for musical watches.
For digital watches, speakers have been used in the past to announce time when a button was pressed. However, since the level of enunciation and intonation was not very high in the first place, the positioning of the speaker in the watch case was not found to be critical, and little attention was paid to this feature.
Accordingly, it is desirable to provide a wristwatch assembly, whether analog or digital, which includes a watch case having incorporated therein an electronic speaker unit for generating sophisticated acoustical and musical sounds.